PM’s plan for Valley: Take to sport, not streets

The Centre is planning to infuse sports in a big way in the Valley as a weapon to check stone-pelting incidents. An all-season football stadium, cricket training by former players and boxing rings in each district — these are part of PM Manmohan Singh’s plan for Kashmir.

Updated on: Apr 13, 2011, 24:45:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Centre is planning to infuse sports in a big way in the Valley as a weapon to check stone-pelting incidents. An all-season football stadium, cricket training by former players and boxing rings in each district — these are part of PM Manmohan Singh’s plan for Kashmir.

Singh had entrusted sports minister Ajay Maken with the task of identifying the sports to that can be promoted. The ministry has identified football, cricket and boxing. “We wanted to concentrate on a few sports popular in the Valley…” a ministry official said.

If implemented effectively, this would be just a push the Valley needs as sports infrastructure is in a shambles here. The two main stadia — Bakshi and Sher-i-Kashmir — are under troop control. The only indoor stadium is also under troop control, but youth are allowed to play. “The polo ground has been divided into two for football and cricket-lovers. The cricket side has developed ditches, while the football side is covered with weeds. Who cares to maintain these grounds?” said 29-year-old cricketer Ishfaq Ahmad.

The sports ministry’s proposal will provide the biggest boost to football in the form of India’s first all-weather stadium. Young Kashmiri footballers had, in a recent interaction with Maken, complained they could not practice for around six months due to snow and rain. “The stadium with flood-lights will have a roof for winters,” a ministry official said. The ministry has also proposed to construct concrete areas for training during the rainy months. “The infrastructure will be developed by sports authority of India,” an official said.

The ministry has decided to get former cricket captains Kapil Dev, Mohammed Azharuddin and Bishen Singh Bedi to conduct training camps for budding cricketers. The government will provide money for setting up cricket academies, officials said.

The sports ministry has also found that decades of militancy has destroyed sports infrastructure in the state. The ministry plans to re-build the half-a-dozen boxing rings burnt during the 1990s and to build boxing arenas in each district.

Ministry officials said the proposal will soon be submitted to the PMO for final approval. The plan is expected to cost over R500 crore. However, the funding pattern is not yet decided.

(With inputs from Srinagar)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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